FESCo wants to ban direct stable pushes in Bodhi (urgent call for feedback)

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

<speaking with my Red Hat firmly off here, just speaking as the good
  old Fedora contributor from back before I was hired by RH>

> at the FESCo meeting on Tuesday, everyone except me seemed to be set on
> wanting to disable the possibility to queue updates directly to stable in
> Bodhi. The only reason this was not decided right there (with no outside
> feedback) is that Matthew Garrett (mjg59) wants to write down a precise
> policy (which may end up even more restrictive, like some arbitrary minimum
> time period of testing).
>

As I understand things from other posts this may be exaggerating a bit, still
I'll respond assuming for now that there are some plans to make it harder
to do direct pushes to stable.

As someone who still maintains circa 200 packages in his spare time (of which
I have a lot less now a days). I'm very much against this. Fedora carries I don't
know how many thousands of packages, and one size does not fit all. Which AFAIK
the whole new critical path package special handling ideas are for.

So lets expand that and also make a "part of default install" group which also
has some additional requirements for pushing to stable.

But amongst those thousands of packages there are a lot which have only
a small amount of users. Requiring maintainers to actively go out and find
multiple of those users and then get them to test it and provide feedback,
to get an updated pushed, is asking too much of the maintainer.

When I started working for Red Hat everyone told me that the most important
thing is that working for Red Hat should be fun, which I completely agree with.

I seriously believe we should also make that an explicit goal for Fedora:
contributing to Fedora should be fun. And FESco should seriously consider the
impact on how much fun contributing to Fedora is, for each new rule they think
they must introduce.

Regards,

Hans

p.s.

With the risk of sort of invoking Godwins law, I would like to point out to
FESco that collective punishment is forbidden under the Geneva convention,
and has been declared as unlawful in several cases for the European court
for human rights. What is the relevance? Well tightening up bodhi pushing
rules because a hand full of maintainers is not handling there responsibilities
feels like a collective punishment to me. I think if FESco wants to do
something about to quick updates pushing by *some* maintainers, it should
come up with a solution which only targets specific maintainers.